Prosecutors Say an Injured Man Turned a Blind Eye Into Treasure

By KIRK SEMPLE

Published: November 11, 2004

Brian Calen was blinded in his right eye in 1985 when he suffered a burn on his retina after a filter dropped out of a telescope he was using on a one-day cruise. That was a legitimate accident, investigators said on Wednesday -- made worse by the fact that Mr. Calen apparently had no insurance at the time.

But each of the next three times he reported losing that same right eye, all on different cruises, he had made sure to take out insurance policies, the investigators said.

He was insured in 1992 when he said he was blinded in a repeat of the telescope accident. He was covered in 1997 when he said he was blinded by glass shards from an exploding wine bottle on a cruise from Miami to South America. And he had insurance in 2002 when he said he was blinded by a Frisbee during a Mississippi riverboat cruise with a Civil War theme, officials said.

''Unless he has three eyes, this is a fraud,'' Jeanine F. Pirro, the Westchester County district attorney, said in a telephone interview.

Mr. Calen, a 48-year-old Dobbs Ferry resident who is a day trader and stay-at-home father, was indicted on Wednesday on insurance-fraud charges. He collected $75,000 in the 1992 telescope case and $1 million in the wine bottle accident, the district attorney said. He tried to file an insurance claim for $500,000 after the purported Frisbee accident, the district attorney's office said, but an insurance company employee, coincidentally, had worked on the 1997 claim.

Mr. Calen was arraigned on Wednesday on charges of fraudulently attempting to collect insurance money and was freed on $10,000 bail, Mrs. Pirro said. If convicted of the charge, he faces up to 15 years in prison, she said.

Mr. Calen could not be reached for comment, and his lawyer, Peter Goodrich, did not respond to a telephone message left at his office.

Mrs. Pirro said Mr. Calen took out an insurance policy -- each with a different insurance company -- before he went on a cruise.

Mrs. Pirro's spokeswoman, Anne Marie Corbalis, said the insurance policies he bought apparently did not require a screening examination.

In the 1997 case, she said, Mr. Calen took the glass from a broken wine bottle and ground it into his eye socket. He received surgery for that injury, she said.

''It's an indication of how eager he was to collect,'' Mrs. Pirro said.